Luke 17:5-6

Vers. 5 and 6. Faith. “ And the apostles said unto the Lord, Increase our faith. 6. And the Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you. ”

This request of the disciples must have been called forth by some manifestation of the extraordinary power of Jesus, with which Luke was unacquainted.

The literal force of the word which the disciples use, “ Add to our faith,” assumes that they think they have some. Jesus does not deny it; but He reduces this having to the feeblest imaginable quantity, since the smallest organic body is too large as an emblem of it.

The only real power in the universe is the divine will. The human will, which has discovered the secret of blending with this force of forces, is raised, in virtue of this union, to omnipotence; and from the time it becomes conscious of this privilege, it acts without obstruction, even in the domain of nature, if the kingdom of God so requires. Perhaps the sycamine to which Jesus points is, in His view, the emblem of the kingdom of God, and the sea (here the shore, the pure sand) that of the heathen world, that, till now, barren soil in which, by the faith and the prayers of the disciples, the divine work is henceforth to be planted and to prosper.

Matthew twice presents a saying similar to that of Luke 17:6, and both times in a definite situation; first, after the healing of the lunatic son, and in contrast to the apostles' lack of faith (Luke 17:20-21). Only in the two cases it is a mountain which is to be cast into the sea. Mark, who in narrating the cursing of the fig-tree shows himself the most accurately informed, there reproduces this parable almost in the same way as Matthew; only he prefaces it with the words, “ Have faith in God,” and connects with it an exhortation to pardon as the condition of prayer being heard. No doubt, owing to the proverbial character of this saying, it may have been frequently repeated. But there is a very remarkable dovetailing between Luke and the two others, Mark especially. Do not the words of Jesus in Mark, Have faith in God and..., perfectly explain the prayer of the apostles in Luke, Increase our faith? Here, as at Luke 12:41 (comp. with Mark 13:37), the one evangelist has preserved one part of the conversation, the other another. With a common written source, is that intelligible? As to the admonition regarding pardon, which in Mark follows this exhortation to faith (Luke 11:24-25), it sustains to the question of Peter (Matthew 18:21), and the exhortation in Luke (Luke 17:3-4), a relation similar to that which we have just observed between Luke 12:41 and Mark 13:37. They are fragments of one whole, the grouping of which it is not difficult to restore.